A Little Curiosity about a Great Big Universe

If you were in charge of the federal budget, would you pay .5 billion to investigate the potential for life on a remote rock? NASA did just that with its Curiosity space probe to Mars. Its other objectives include the study of the Martian climate and geology, and the collection of data for any future manned missions to the Red Planet. The one-ton, car-size Curiosity joins five other functioning spacecraft on the planet’s surface, all humming away and sending us bits of information. Marvelous technology to be sure, but $2.5 billion to study the potential for life? For an estimated two-year mission, that’s an investment of $3.4 million per day! Can’t we do that kind of study more cheaply from Earth?

What instruments does Curiosity harbor to detect life, present or past? At it turns out, despite all the hyperbole, none whatsoever. The little beast carries 10 science gadgets including a drill, scoop, radiation emitter and detector, magnifying lens, and cameras. Yet nary one can detect either present-day life or fossilized microorganisms. The rover is capable only of verifying three conditions necessary for life as we know it: the presence of liquid water, certain chemical ingredients, and an energy source. Any kid with a whit of curiosity knows that you won’t get a beaker of bugs from a simple bouillabaisse of water, chemicals, and an electrical spark even with a lifetime of shake-and-bake! The stuff of life is billions of years in the making, and Mars had its stuffing knocked out of it over the eons by meteor strikes and volcanism. Some scientists – me included – think it’s not a dead planet, but a nonliving planet – and there’s a world of difference. Using a little basic biology and chemistry, we figure it never had life in the first place.

Here’s the raison d’être. The “signature” of life is embedded in a planet’s atmospheric chemistry. Life and nonlife leave a recognizable, co-evolutionary seal on their relations over time including the composition of its sky. Space research affords these features of Earth and its closest neighbors:

• Venus: 95-96% carbon dioxide, 3-4 % nitrogen, trace of oxygen
• Earth: Trace of carbon dioxide, 77% nitrogen, 21% oxygen
• Mars: 95% carbon dioxide, 2.7% nitrogen, trace of oxygen

The devil’s in the detail, so to speak. Thus, an alien from a remote location in the universe with the proper instruments might surmise that Earth is a living planet simply from its surprising atmospheric spectrograph compared to its neighbors. So there goes mission objective #1: the chemistry is all wrong. Mars and Venus are planets in expected chemical equilibrium; and Earth with its 30 million species interwoven dynamically with air, water, and soil is not – and that evolving disequilibrium shows up historically in the gaseous composition of our blanketing atmosphere.

What about the other two objectives: study of the Martian climate and geology, and the collection of data for future manned missions to the Red Planet? I’m just as curious as the next guy about a planet or a galaxy “far, far away.” But I keep thinking about that price tag. The average cost of bringing a new drug to market is a staggering $1.3 billion. The average cost of listing an animal or plant as an endangered species (with all the incumbent protections) is a mere $85,000. So the Mars mission equates to two new drugs on the market or 30,000 types of organisms afforded the protected status of endangered species! As a less-than-stellar steward of Earth, why would we humans mosey over to Mars to try it again? We’ve already left some of our junk there, the working probes notwithstanding. That’s not a great start on stewardship.

So my recommendations as a scientist? First, let’s have NASA stop sending these risky, somewhat frivolous toys into space at great expense to taxpayers. Instead let’s work on near-space exploration via the international space station and orbiting telescopes. Second, let’s invest alternatively in conservation projects on Earth. Species are vanishing across the planet, threatening the tapestry of life itself: let’s do something positive about that. We also need to work quickly and effectively on human-accelerated climate change. Third, let’s fix science education in the country. Let’s stop trying to impose religion or politics on science instruction in public schools (e.g., creationist myth and anti-climate change bunkum) and teach instead the subject matter with rigorous methodology and standards. Fourth, let’s clean up our home base before venturing far afield to demonstrate the worthiness of our expansionism. I offer these recommendations especially as we move toward 2050, a sure point of no return if we cannot fix our human-caused woes for a planet in crisis. It’s a great big universe, but our curiosity needs to be focused first and foremost at home.

 – H. Bruce Rinker, Ph.D.